Believe me, when I looked at the pictures on the screen, my hands were shaking. My heart was beating. I realized that this is a picture you take once in a blue moon. It’s being there at the right time, at the right moment, at the right place, with the right lens. If you want to shoot artsy stuff, you never have the lens for this. If you’re covering the war with a 35-millimeter and a 50-millimeter lens, you’ll never have this.

via Patrick Baz Is in His Element in Libya – NYTimes.com.

Recommended Posts

4 Comments

  1. i don’t understand what he means. why is he saying he was able to capture the pic b/c he was not using 35mm with a 50mm lens? what was he using? a wide angle was necessary, is that what he was saying? confusing…

  2. “Hi there,
    – I was using a 70x200mm F2.8
    – Both crew members died. The one who managed to eject was to low on the ground.
    Cheers/Patrick ”

    guess that answers that. a 50mm would have worked fine though maybe.

  3. As a war veteran I can understand (in a way) what the reference is. There are times especially in war, natural crisis or just across the street where one lives where a state of the art camera or the fastest lense can’t capture and that is our own eye.

    We hear it all the times, Oh! I forgot may camera or you shoot a second too late.

    It is that instant second that the camera can’t capture but that image is embeded in your mind.

  4. Wait a minute! A lens other than “normal” was used. That means the photographer changed reality which is akin to cropping an image. Oh My Goodness How Could The NY Times Ever Publish Such An Image??


Comments are closed for this article!